Developing apps is easier starting from XML

By Alan Radding

06/01/2005

XBRL application development shouldn’t be too hard, at least at the level
most corporate IT shops will do it. They will adopt and extend a ready-made
taxonomy, which is the hard part. Taxonomies will be provided by organizations
such as XBRL International. The U.S. Generally Accepted Accounting Principles
taxonomy available today may be sufficient for most companies.

When you come down to it, “XBRL is XML,” says Hugh Wallis, an independent
consultant working for XBRL International. Developers and IT staff who
are familiar with XML can pretty quickly orient themselves to working with XBRL.

The biggest wrinkle will likely involve the use of XLinks. XLinks are used
to provide more semantic detail for the elements of an XBRL taxonomy. An XLink
specifies an explicit relationship between resources or portions of resources,
according to the W3C. The organization defines six XLink elements, only two
of which actually are considered linking elements. The others describe the characteristics
of a link.

“When we started working with XBRL, I was just using Notepad,”
says Mark Montoya, systems analyst and XBRL specialist at the FDIC. That didn’t
last long; he quickly moved on to other tools specifically intended
for use in XBRL development, such as those from UBmatrix.

A handful of vendors offer XBRL tools. For example, Microsoft has inserted
XBRL capabilities in several of its products, and also markets a version of
EDGAR Online’s I-Metrix Architect called Office Solution Accelerator for
XBRL. In addition, UBmatrix’s Automator XBRL Professional Studio
is a Windows desktop application for creating and deploying XBRL-enabled business
reporting structures and reporting documents. It can be used to create,
exchange and validate complex taxonomies and extensions. UBmatrix also offers
a server-based application for importing, converting and validating data into
XBRL, the Universal Converter. It has other tools to enable Web applications
and third-party software for XBRL.

Hitachi and Fujitsu also offer technologies that address aspects of the XBRL
challenge. More products are expected. “This is immature technology. It
is still very early in the process,” says Robert Kugel, VP and research
director at Ventana Research.